Seasoning of Plasma Reactors: Effects of Ion Energy Distributions to Chamber Walls

摘要

Wafer to wafer process reproducibility during plasma etching often depends on the conditioning of theinterior walls of the reactor. Deposition of passivation on chamber walls can change the reactivesticking coefficients for radicals, thereby changing the composition of the radical and ion fluxes to thesubstrate. Ion bombardment of the walls may affect the passivation coverage or production of etchinfluencing species through activation of sites or sputtering. As such the spatial distribution of ionenergies on the walls and their evolution as the chamber seasons are important. These seasoningprocesses may occur during a single etching sequence recipe due to there being incomplete initialseasoning or on a wafer-to-wafer basis. In this work, the seasoning of plasma etching reactors will bediscussed using results from a computational investigation.